And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (23 page)

Wanting to get the maximum return on our investment in Angel, we decided that our six-month-old Film Works division should produce a ninety-minute Angel concert movie. The thirty-five-millimeter film, which would cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to make, would showcase the band’s new stage show and feature fantasy sequences of the band performing in Heaven. Fifty prints of the movie would be distributed to local radio stations in advance of tour dates. A single weekend screening in each market would begin at the stroke of midnight—the film would be titled
Angel at Midnight.
Given the recent release of
The Song Remains the Same,
the wildly popular midnight screenings of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
and the fact that we had an in-house film division, an Angel movie wasn’t that hard a sell. Cleveland, one of the band’s biggest strongholds, was chosen as the location for the live segments. WMMS-FM sponsored the event, which took place on April 6 at the Public Hall and cost patrons only $1.01 each. Attendees were strongly encouraged to wear white so that in the film it would look like they were in Heaven with the band. Then, in the second week of May, additional “beauty coverage” (close-up footage) of the band was shot in LA.

We hired Peter Lake, who had worked with Peter Guber on
The Deep,
as vice president of creative services in late 1976. Lake began editing the raw Angel footage at FilmWorks, downstairs at 8255 Sunset. But the film was never completed. There were several contributing factors to this decision. Neil was beginning to get cold feet about Angel (as was I); plus, Angel’s original bassist, Mickie Jones, had been fired just before the final pickup shots were done. I recently ran across a blurb in a 1977 issue of
Circus
that said we were so pleased with the movie that we were thinking of doing a second Angel film in 3-D. Pleased? We’d never even seen the film. This just goes to show that we would put a shiny ribbon on a funeral casket.

As an interesting sidenote, before
Angel at Midnight
completely fell apart, we met with brass at MCA DiscoVision to discuss releasing the movie on an emerging videodisc format, which eventually became LaserDisc (if you’re too young to recall the format, just imagine a twelve-inch DVD). At that point, the entire entertainment industry was eagerly anticipating the arrival of the home video medium, and, for a while, the low-cost videodisc looked like the way things were moving. Neil was well aware of its potential, and since Casablanca had such visual acts, we strongly believed that we’d have a serious advantage over our peers when the time came. With this in mind, Peter Lake was overseeing the future production of promotional films for our artists and tie-ins for our movies. I found out years later that Peter had infiltrated the Aryan Nation to write about the group. Peter was a tall, blond white guy, so I can’t imagine he found it hard to work his way in. He eventually testified in the case involving the 1984 murder (allegedly by the Aryan Nation) of Denver radio host Alan Berg.

All record companies have subsidiary labels. We could not consider ourselves real players unless we had some smaller companies under our umbrella. Neil had always kept an eye open for these opportunities. Of course, our first subsidiary had been Giorgio Moroder’s Oasis, which we’d acquired in 1975, but Oasis had been totally absorbed into Casablanca and had ceased to exist. In July 1976, Neil had begun to solidify a relationship with Douglas Records, an all-jazz label founded and run by longtime producer Alan Douglas. The deal had included the rights to rerelease twenty archive albums. Among the first were albums by The Last Poets and legendary jazz guitarist John McLaughlin. Both albums had been previously released, and I don’t remember the reissues going much of anywhere. We renewed the deal in February 1977, but if the Douglas-Casablanca pairing is remembered at all, it is for a five-album set called
Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions,
which was released in March 1977 and to this day carries some weight in experimental jazz circles.

The next signing was Millennium Records, headed by Jimmy Ienner and Irv Biegel; Jimmy’s brother, Donnie, was their only promo guy. Jimmy was the producer of the Raspberries, and Irv was a record guy who had been around a long time. He was also friends with Jeff Franklin of ATI, and Jeff helped strike the deal with Neil. Since we all loved Donnie, this looked like it might be fun.

In March, we opened up a New York office with Millennium at 3 West Fifty-Seventh Street. A matter of months later, Millennium was ready to deliver its first album,
Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk,
which was the brainchild of Meco (Domenico Monardo) and an obvious attempt to ride to success on the back of the
Star Wars
phenomena, which was then sweeping the nation. The young musician was enamored of the film, and he’d decided it would be a great idea to create a disco version of John Williams’s score. Today it’s easy to recognize
Star Wars
as a cash cow, but at the time Neil had to talk Jimmy Ienner into putting the Meco album on Millennium, as Jimmy didn’t like it. We’d have been more than happy to keep Meco on the Casablanca roster, but it was important for the new label to establish itself as a bona fide presence in the biz, and nothing spoke louder than a Platinum album. Neil knew it was a guaranteed hit, and he gave Ienner little choice in the matter.

The LP was coming out at the same time as the official 20th Century Fox soundtrack set, and with John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra on board, 20th Century Fox clearly had the upper hand. Our promotions department would have weekly conference calls late on Sunday afternoons to get everybody hyped up about the releases they’d be working that week. During the call related to the Meco release, Bruce made sure that everyone understood it was Casablanca versus 20th Century Fox, and that we were the underdogs.

When the promotion staff arrived the next day, they found an unwelcome delivery from Harvey Cooper, head of the promotions department at 20th Century Fox—a black wreath with a banner announcing that Fox was going to bury us with their
Star Wars
record. Needless to say, the promotions department went ballistic over the threat, redoubled their efforts, and got us our very first No. 1 single: Meco’s “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band,” the biggest-selling instrumental single in the history of the music business. But it wasn’t Harvey Cooper who had sent the wreath. It was Bruce Bird. He’d had Soozin send it to him to create a villain and thus motivate the promotions department. And it worked.

One of the things that stands out in my mind about Millennium, and especially Donnie, was that whenever he and Howie Rosen found themselves in a city at the same time, I would get a call from our accounting department. We would have to pay for the hotel rooms Donnie and Howie destroyed. They thought they were wrestling stars, and they would battle each other with little regard for the furniture and fixtures. Donnie became CEO of Sony Records, and I wonder if he put up with such shenanigans from his people.

Another of our subsidiary ventures was Parachute Records, run by Russ Regan. Russ was a legend in the music business, as he had discovered both Elton John and Barry White. He was president of MCA Records, and he’d had the foresight to sign Elton (he’s kept in close contact with him to this day). MCA seemed to go through presidents like a shark goes through teeth. The company’s primary focus was movies, not music, and for some reason they had a great deal of trouble finding or keeping people who knew what to do and how to do it in the music sector. Russ had started up Parachute after being dismissed as head of MCA.

Russ was a nice guy. We supplied him with offices in one of the buildings on our Sunset lot, which was a natural fit for him since between 1967 and 1972 he had headed MCA’s Universal City Records at the same location. Again, it was very important to Neil that the new label had a hit, but no matter how hard we tried, we could not bring home the money for Russ. There was no new Meco with a disco smash for Russ, and we all felt bad that things weren’t working out for him. The situation came to a head when Neil told me and Bruce to go over to Russ’s office and tell him we were not going to re-sign him once his original contract was up (which was soon). I was not crazy about being the bearer of this news, as I hadn’t had anything to do with signing the label in the first place, but Neil asked, so I swung the axe. Because I wasn’t happy playing the role of executioner, I was fairly blunt with Russ. Bruce was no help to me—he liked Russ, too, and he wanted no part of the conversation.

Years later, I met Russ at a convention, and he told me that he had been under the impression that ending the relationship had been all my idea because when he went to say goodbye to Neil, Neil had told him that he’d known nothing about it and had only found out from me after it was all done. I explained to Russ that Neil would never have left a decision to drop a label, especially one that I’d had no hand in signing, up to me. Such a decision would come from the very top; my opinion might be solicited, but the final decision would always come from Neil.

Neil and I were no longer leading the charge with every single thing that was happening. We were now too busy running the company, which had expanded way beyond our ability to micromanage. Our interaction with much of the company was no longer on the level of intimate detail, and we had pulled back to weekly meetings of department heads in either my office or Neil’s. We used these weekly get-togethers to disseminate information through the departments, which no longer managed to communicate with each other very well. Neil and I were still having fun, but this behemoth was growing at such a rate that it was hard to be as hands-on as we would have liked.

To boost company morale, we began a newsletter of sorts, called
Inside the Casbah,
to report on what was happening within the company so that everyone would be aware of what their colleagues were up to. It was produced by the press department and handled by writer Walter Wanger, a very bright guy who would become an integral part of our special products division. The newsletter, which came out every few weeks, began with a one- or two-page letter from Neil on company letterhead (the best-looking stuff in the biz, except that the Casablanca logo took up the entire top third of the page, leaving room for about two lines of text after the address and salutation); the letter related news on all upcoming releases and trumpeted the successes we’d had that week or month, all in typical Neil fashion: Great, great—everything is great! Following that were photocopies of the articles or blurbs on Casablanca that had appeared in the trades, along with copies of radio ad sheets listing our active singles and albums and a list of the radio stations that had added them to their rotations. At the end of each issue was a column called “The CIA Report,” which stood for “Casablanca Informs America.” It was written by Walter, and it made fun of all of us, including Neil and me. It spread all sorts of ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek gossip about various people. Cutting the executives down to size not only helped employees feel that we execs were people they could come and talk to, but it also ensured that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. “The CIA Report” lasted only a short while, as Walter became preoccupied with more important projects and Neil grew more thin-skinned about the Dean-Martin-roast quality of the newsletter’s jibes, many of them aimed at him. The daily pressures of wrangling with this monster we’d created were beginning to wear on him, and the loss of his sense of humor (one of his most upfront and likable qualities) was just the first of many changes.

 

 

Neil was talking to me about a new project he wanted us to get into. We would be getting the official pitch in a few minutes, and he was pacing around my office giving me the details on the band and prepping me for the meetings that would ensue. He mentioned the players, but all that stuck in my head was the list of characters he described: guys dressed in leather, a construction worker, a cop, and some cowboys and Indians. “Great,” I thought, “I’m now a casting director meeting with an overcaffeinated Hollywood producer.”

These guys weren’t cops or cowboys any more than George Clinton was an outer-space pimp. They were a newly created group who called themselves the Village People—a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek parody that had been assembled by two French producers and their novice New York music attorney. The producers, Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, had been creating music in Europe for years with a modicum of success, but they were now concentrating on the US. They brought with them to our meeting a young lawyer named Allen Grubman, who was about to make the first deal of his long and storied entertainment career.

Morali and Belolo had recently relocated from France to New York in hopes of making their entry into the American music scene. Morali (who was openly gay) and Belolo (who was straight) started hanging out at Manhattan’s hot nightclubs, and they noticed that many patrons showed up dressed in character—as cowboys, or Indians, or what have you. They hit upon the idea of creating a band comprised entirely of such characters; they were so taken with Americana that they wanted each band member to represent some aspect of the American dream—or, at least, the American dream as interpreted by two Frenchmen living in Greenwich Village. They figured that the act would have a built-in audience in gay nightclubs. But where to place them?

The two had picked up on Casablanca’s maverick approach to the music biz, and they were impressed that we’d developed KISS and Parliament, two fairly out-there acts that many of the major labels wouldn’t have looked at twice (remember that the Warner execs had initially hated KISS, telling us that the band should lose the makeup to be more palatable to the music-buying public). Morali and Belolo knew their vision for the Village People was likely to be met with ambivalence or derision if they pitched it to the likes of Capitol or Columbia. But with Neil they felt they’d found the perfect match. It didn’t hurt that we’d broken the disco genre wide open with Donna Summer, either.

So, they flew out to LA to meet with Neil. As they walked into Neil’s office, I saw that both Henri and Jacques were very cosmopolitan guys with a flair for fashion. Morali was energetic, flamboyant, and a bit prissy—definitely the salesman of the two. Belolo tended to hang back, was more subdued, and was the business force behind the project. After we exchanged some pleasantries, they got right to their pitch. They played us a recording of the Village People. The album, which was maybe twenty minutes long, was already a complete package, including artwork. This was a strong selling point for us: Casablanca would only need to manufacture and market the record; and with the cover done, we were already halfway home as far as marketing went. If the material was good, this would be an easy sell.

Neil immediately loved it, but he decided to let me put it to the “Casablanca test” first. This consisted of playing a song at such a high volume that everyone in the entire two-story building would hear it. If people came running to find out what it was, we knew we had something. I played the record at ear-splitting volume, and the office quickly filled with people from sales, promotion, and PR—everyone was attracted to the music. Neil’s eyes were glowing, and we both sensed that this crazy idea had the makings of a monster. The album cover was the cherry on top: we were the label of KISS, Parliament, and Angel, so this group of guys dressed as leather fetishists, Indians, and construction workers was right up our alley. We got it!

Neil sat down with Allen Grubman and signed the group on the strength of the finished album. We’d yet to meet or speak to a single member of the band, and we wouldn’t for several months. The guys were cast members more than musicians or singers (though each could carry a tune), and the idea was for them to be entertaining, not create great music. None of us paid attention to the fact that the Village People and their vibe were blatantly gay. Frankly, not only did we not pay attention to it, but we didn’t even realize it. Their music was so energetic that it demanded your attention. I don’t think it was possible not to like it. But anything more than a five-second glance at the band revealed an array of obvious references to the homosexual lifestyle, which was the foundation of so much disco music.

This aspect of disco never bothered Neil or me. Again, the Village People’s best songs were so catchy—you were instantly pulled into their hook-laden melodies, and that’s all that mattered. This is precisely how (and the irony is laugh-inducing) many fundamentalists who regard the homosexual lifestyle with contempt can dance around shrieking “Y—M—C—A” at the top of their lungs along with the Village People, happy as clams, oblivious to any subtext or message. Great melodies hide lyrical meaning, which is why a song like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” can be considered a pro-American anthem when it’s nothing of the sort.

With the addition to our roster of the Village People, disco became Neil’s new bubblegum. Not everyone at Casablanca was unaware of the sizable homosexual presence in disco culture, and a fissure grew between the disco and rock contingents. As our disco department expanded, a few homophobes in the company—mainly in the pop department—began to reveal themselves. They mostly kept their mouths shut, but Neil and I could feel the tension. Some of them would refuse to shake hands with a person (an artist or a fellow employee) who was gay, or even breathe the same air. A few snide comments were made in meetings, but it never went beyond that.

Our first and still premier disco act was Donna Summer. But we just couldn’t duplicate the huge breakout success of her initial album and single, released in 1975. The follow-up, which came out in March 1976, was titled
A Love Trilogy,
and it had gone Gold, but the buzz that surrounded “Love to Love You Baby” just wasn’t there. Donna’s
Four Seasons of Love
followed, coming out around Thanksgiving. It was a five-song concept LP based on the four seasons (spring had two songs). The second single, “Winter Melody,” came out in January 1977, and it had the distinction of being one of the very first 12-inch singles ever released. (Disco clubs, which liked to play epic-length singles, were the prime movers behind the creation of the 12-inch single.) The same month, we had Peter Lake direct and produce a sixteen-minute Donna Summer promotional film, portions of which he shot at Donna’s Benedict Canyon home. The primary footage for Donna’s promo was lensed on a very warm day, which was all wrong for a “Winter Melody” (one of the tracks Peter was shooting). Peter came up with the idea to spray a semiopaque white material over the lens to simulate winter, and the stunt actually worked. The extra attention garnered us another Gold album, but again the record had no real legs, no hype sustaining it. Desperate to keep Donna from sliding to one-hit-wonder status, in February we released a two-track limited edition LP of
Love to Love You Baby
(not to be confused with the 1975 Oasis album of the same name), which was designed as a greeting card to capitalize on the Valentine’s Day market.

The promotions department came up with the idea of sending copies of the LP to radio stations accompanied by an oversized heart-shaped chocolate that complemented the LP’s cover art. Karmen Beck, who worked in promotion for us, was working overtime to get 150-plus Jiffy LP mailers ready to ship out, and yellow boxes of the chocolate were stacked in the hallway outside the promotions department. Neil walked by, noticed the huge pile of candy, and casually asked Karmen what she was doing. “That’s a nice idea, Karmen, but what is this chocolate? It’s not Godiva. Since this is Donna, and we’re Casablanca, only the very best will do. Fix it!” Poor Karmen had to redo most of the packages at home in order to make her deadline. We then flooded the scene with advertising for what we thought was a cash cow. Same results: good sales, no buzz.

When something isn’t working, an artist has to blame someone, and artists rarely, if ever, blame themselves. Donna decided that a change of management was in order, and Dick Broder was out. Her other manager—Joyce Bogart—remained, of course; and Jeff Wald was brought on board to oversee her affairs. The association was short and not sweet. Donna never got along with Jeff, and he found her diva-like attitude to be unprofessional—intolerable, in fact—a sentiment that he would later express publicly.

By mid-May 1977, we were ready to roll out yet another Donna Summer album:
I Remember Yesterday.
This was Neil’s standard tactic, and we’d already used it with KISS: if the public didn’t like an album or a song, then it was time for a new one, even if only six months had elapsed between releases. After three KISS albums had come out in rapid succession and generated moderate success, the band broke big-time with
Alive!
and quickly followed it up with
Destroyer,
which expanded upon what
Alive!
had done. But with Donna, panic was beginning to set in. Since her debut, she had won a tremendous amount of peer acceptance, as well as industry awards too numerous to mention. But those accolades couldn’t save her flatlining career.
I Remember Yesterday
was the final LP we would do with Donna under the terms of our original agreement, and we knew if we didn’t hit it out of the park, then Donna would be shopping for a new record company.

“Can’t We Just Sit Down (And Talk It Over)” came out as the first single. Thirty- and sixty-second TV spots aired all over the place as the summer wore on, and still nothing. Then, echoing what had happened with “Beth” the previous summer, toward the end of July, someone (I don’t recall who) turned the 7-inch single over and began to play the B side, which contained a hypnotic little song that would become Donna’s first Gold single since “Love to Love You Baby.” That single, “I Feel Love,” not only rescued her and us, but, due to Giorgio Moroder’s innovative production (most disco songs featured orchestral accompaniment at that point, but “I Feel Love” had an entirely synthesized background), it significantly altered the direction of club music and jump-started the techno and electronica genres. The song and its production were so brilliant that five years later, in 1982, it was lengthened, remixed, and rereleased, achieving hit status all over again.

By the summer of 1977, disco was beginning to drive the company, even though KISS was still our premier act and was continuing to scale new heights. Their June release,
Love Gun,
had contractually shipped Platinum, a first for us and them. The memos from Glickman/Marks that came across my desk detailing production costs for a new tour were eye-popping—this on the heels of the one hundred thousand dollars they’d spent to record
Love Gun.
Two hydraulic platforms were installed to lower the band at the beginning of the show from the top of their now towering backline of cabinets to the stage. The staircase concept from the
Destroyer
tour had been expanded, Peter Criss’s drum riser now not only went up but also slid forward to the front of the stage, and two portions of the stage itself now rose more than ten feet into the air during and at the end of the show. And KISS wanted
two
of these stages so that while they were performing on one stage, the stage for the subsequent show could be assembled. The entire outlay for this mess, including having new costumes designed and made, was nearly two hundred thousand dollars. That didn’t sound impressive enough, so we told the press it was a million-dollar production.

Shortly after
Love Gun
was released, Marvel Comics issued a KISS comic book. It featured the band members as superheroes, which gave Neil an idea: Casablanca could create a comic book for a female disco superhero. He presented the idea to Marvel. Given that the KISS comic was their largest seller ever to that point, they were very happy to develop it. Thus Dazzler was born. One day, I went into Neil’s office and saw several panels that had been submitted for approval. I picked one up and was shocked to see that Marvel had actually drawn an image of Neil and introduced it into the action. The concept was tossed back and forth between Marvel and us for so long that it eventually lost its charm for everyone involved and evaporated. I had forgotten all about it until years later, in 1981, I happened to see the first issue in a comic-book store.

KISS was now becoming an anomaly for us—a white-hot rock band in a growing stable of disco artists. Since we’d released the first Donna Summer album and “Love to Love You Baby,” we had been talking up disco. We hadn’t been big believers in the genre before this; it had seemed insubstantial, a little too much like the flavor of the month, but once we saw that the genre had staying power at the clubs and recognized that the clubs could dramatically influence radio, we embraced it. It was a money-making product, and we were in the money-making business.